Discussions and claims about artificial intelligence often conflate quite different types of AI systems. People need both to understand and to shape the technology that’s part of their day-to-day lives, but understanding is a challenge when descriptions and terms are used inconsistently — or over-broadly. This idea is part of a 2019 essay titled Artificial Intelligence — The Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet, published in the Harvard Data Science Review.
“Academia will also play an essential role … in bringing researchers from the computational and statistical disciplines together with researchers from other disciplines whose contributions and perspectives are sorely needed — notably the social sciences, the cognitive sciences, and the humanities,” wrote Michael I. Jordan, whose lengthy job title is Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley.
Jordan’s thoughtful, very readable essay is accompanied by 11 essay-length commentaries by various distinguished people and a rejoinder from Jordan himself.
In one of those commentaries, Barbara J. Grosz emphasized that “Rights of both individuals and society are at stake” in the shaping of technologies and practices built on AI systems. She said researchers and scholars in social science, cognitive science, and the humanities are vital participants in “determining the values and principles that will form the foundation” of a new AI discipline. Grosz is Higgins Research Professor of Natural Sciences at Harvard and the recipient of a lifetime achievement award from the Association for Computational Linguistics.
“When matters of life and well-being are at stake, as they are in systems that affect health care, education, work and justice, AI/ML systems should be designed to complement people, not replace them. They [the AI/ML systems] will need to be smart and to be good teammates,” Grosz wrote.
Concerns about ethical practices in the development of AI systems, in the collection and use of data, and in the deployment and use of technology based on AI systems are not new now, nor were they new in 2019. The idea of having the right mix of people in the room, at the table, however, has recently focused on racial, ethnic, socio-cultural and economic diversity more, perhaps, than on diversity of academic disciplines. Bringing in researchers from outside engineering, statistics, computer science, etc., can surface questions that would never arise in a group consisting only of engineers, statisticians, and computer scientists.
For me, those ideas dovetailed with a book chapter I happened to read on the previous day: “Beyond extraordinary: Theorizing artificial intelligence and the self in daily life,” in A Networked Self and Human Augmentics, Artificial Intelligence, Sentience (2018). Author Andrea L. Guzman wrote that in many senses, AI has become “ordinary” for us — one example is the voice assistants used by so many people in a completely everyday way. Intelligent robots and androids like Star Trek’s Lieutenant Commander Data, or evil world-controlling computer systems like Skynet in the Terminator movies, are part of a view of AI as “extraordinary” — which was the AI imagined for the future, before we had voice assistants and self-driving cars in the real world.
To be clear, there still exists the idea of extraordinary AI, super-intelligence or artificial general intelligence (AGI) — the “strong” AI that does not yet exist (and maybe never will). What Guzman describes is the way people today regard the AI–based tools and systems with which they interact. The AI that is, rather than the AI that might be.
How that connects to what both Jordan and Grosz wrote about interdisciplinary collaboration in AI development is this: Guzman is a journalism professor at Northern Illinois University, and she’s writing about the ways people communicate with a built system. Not interact with it, but communicate with it. When she investigated people’s perceptions and attitudes toward voice assistants, she realized that we don’t think about Siri and Alexa as intelligent devices. I was struck by Guzman’s description of how she initially approached her study and how her own perceptions changed.
“Conceptualizations of who we are in relation to AI, then, have formed around the myth that is AI” (Guzman, 2018, p. 87). “… I was applying a theory of the self that was developed around AI as extraordinary to the study of AI that was situated within the ordinary. The theoretical lens was an inadequate match for my subject” (Guzman, 2018, p. 90).
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